Vapor IO and some of its vendor partners are creating private wireless “Industry Zones” in various metropolitan areas. They plan to serve the private wireless needs of multiple enterprises with shared infrastructure in a defined geography.
The city of Las Vegas and surrounding Clark County, Nevada, will host the first Inzone, which encompasses the Las Vegas Strip and nearby industrial areas. It will serve the local schools and can potentially serve local government, manufacturers, retailers, hospitals, hotels, convention centers and casinos.
The City of Las Vegas has been a leader in private wireless. In July it worked with California-based Terranet Communications to install a municipal LTE/5G private network to help school kids get an internet connection.
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Matthew Trifiro, chief marketing officer at Vapor IO, said the company is working with Terranet to expand the existing private wireless network. Vapor IO has already deployed three of its mini data centers in Las Vegas and plans to deploy two to three more.
Other companies involved in the Inzone project in Las Vegas include Amazon Web Services (AWS) and VMware. AWS will provide its Outposts, making it possible to run AWS workloads as if they were on-premises. VMware will provide its Telco Cloud Platform and Multi-Cloud Services Grid.
“It all comes down to delivering infrastructure within microseconds of the target facilities,” said Cole Crawford, founder and CEO of Vapor IO, in a statement. “We call this unique combinations of technologies Inzone because it enables Industry 4.0 application within a physical geography without requiring on-premises data centers.”
Vapor IO learnings
Last year at this time, Vapor IO had its mini data center platform live in four markets and said it had plans to build out the platform in 36 markets by the end of 2021. That didn’t happen. Trifiro said, “We were more ambitious than the market was ready for. We’ve had some strategic learnings.” Now, the company says it’s working on all 36 markets “in parallel.”
Its platform is currently live in six markets, including Las Vegas.
It strategically deploys its mini data centers based on about 100 criteria. In many cases, the chosen location ends up being at the base of a cell tower. But it recently partnered with the fiber deployer Zayo, and it often places its data centers on top of fiber intersection points.
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One of the things the company learned was to decrease the size of its mini data centers. “We started deploying 150-180 kilowatt data centers; they were about the size of a municipal city bus,” said Trifiro. But the company learned that smaller data centers allowed for more densification and cost less. So, it designed a 20-kilowatt data center that is about the size of a large car or SVU.
It’s using the smaller data centers in Las Vegas. They contain two racks, one dedicated to wireless infrastructure — the CU and DU — and the other dedicated for compute.
Each data center serves about a 10-kilometer circular radius. Parts of the circles overlap, allowing for multi-site redundancy.
How can it be both “private” wireless and use “shared” infrastructure?
Trifiro said the CU, DU and core network can use shared infrastructure, along with a shared fiber connection. “And a systems integrator would hang radio heads, and now you’ve got private 5G with compute right adjacent to it,” he said. “The economics of shared infrastructure is so compelling. We have a multi-tenant environment and all you have to do is hang the radio heads.”